


Wake-Up Calls

by Lapsed_Scholar



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cell Phones, Episode: s07e10 Sein Und Zeit, Episode: s07e11 Closure, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Season/Series 06, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 20:10:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: Government-issued cell phones are remarkably identical.(Or, Four times Mulder answered Scully's phone at an incriminating hour, and one time she answered his)





	Wake-Up Calls

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be pure fluff and humor, but some sentiment got into it and proved impossible to remove.

_An unremarkable apartment_  
_Washington, DC_  
_July 2015_  
_5:34 AM  
_  

Fox Mulder is very used to waking up to a ringing phone—he’s been doing it now for thirty years, give or take, with callers ranging from shady, covert sources to local law enforcement and FBI officials. One memorable time, it was a ghost (though Scully still insists “It wasn’t a ghost, Mulder; it was just ordinary EMI—electromagnetic interference—it happens to connections sometimes,” and he retorts “What, sounding like that?” and her rejoinder, “OK, I admit that it sounded unusual, but that doesn’t mean it was a ghost”). He’s always been a light sleeper and borderline insomniac (with the exception of a few dark years when he seemed to do nothing but sleep), and he usually wakes fairly readily to answer late night and early morning calls with relative equanimity.

Of course, thirty years ago, he wasn’t expected to solve a fucking memorization puzzle with a bleary brain and blearier eyes (he’s knocked his glasses to the floor fumbling for the phone). His fingers fly over where he knows the numbers are with increasing insistence— _dammit_ —before he finally gets the current combination on the third try. He still does have a remarkable memory, but too many holes in his head have perhaps dulled its precision.

_(“There is no such thing as a photographic memory,” Scully informed him matter-of-factly, out of the blue, as they were driving home from a case during the first year of their partnership. She had pivoted in the passenger seat to face him fully, elbow resting on the center console and chin on her fist, with a challenging spark in her eye. He glanced over at her, simultaneously charmed and irritated, quirked his mouth up, and rattled off a dozen obscure and esoteric facts meant to both annoy and impress her. She just snorted and regarded him with an odd little smile he later came to recognize as indulgent. “You have a_ remarkable _memory, Mulder, but it isn’t photographic.”)_

“Yeah. Mulder,” he answers the phone a bit sharply, but mostly reigns in the irritation occasioned by the early hour and the stubborn combination.

When silence greets him, though, he starts to lose a handle on his fraying temper. “ _Hello?_ ”

It turns out to be a good thing he mostly controls himself because it’s Skinner on the other end. And despite that brief opening pause, his former and current boss proceeds with the conversation entirely normally, outlining a new case that requires their expertise, starting as soon as possible. Mulder is listening almost on autopilot, assimilating information, planning angles of investigation, and he is caught off-guard by Skinner’s final instructions.

“Get down here as soon as you can, Agent Mulder. Oh, and bring Agent Scully with you.” And, with that, the call ends.

There’s a slight smile in the phrase, mixed with a hint of the long-suffering, resigned tone that Skinner uses these days when Mulder flouts rules just as resolutely as he always has. Mulder is a little startled because, of all the regulations he’s broken, the one against fraternization is the one that Skinner has never really brought up, other than the occasional pointed hint that they’d been a bit too blatant. (Well, before they had a child together, anyway. That was about as blatant as it got, but there had been larger problems at the time.)

Skinner knows that they had gone on the run together and lived together, of course, and it’s never been something he either commented on or asked about. But he also has to have seen the separate addresses on their new personnel forms, which is also something he neither commented on or asked about. And because he is who he is, Mulder entertains a very brief thought that their old boss is psychic and he has somehow missed it for years.

Then his eyes move down to the phone he’s been loosely holding while contemplating all this. And even though he can’t see particularly well, he can see well enough to make out the less-familiar home screen now that he’s focusing on it.

Shit _._ He’s answered Scully’s phone.

Again.

Scattered pieces click into place in his brain. The struggle he had with landing on the correct combination. The slight pause at the beginning of Skinner’s briefing. The fact that there’s only one night stand in Scully’s bedroom, and it’s on his side of the bed, and he has been trying very hard not to overanalyze this fact and assign a dozen different meanings to it. The fact that, on reviewing the situation, his own phone is nowhere to be found and certainly not within earshot. If he remembers correctly, it’s still in the pocket of his suit coat. Which is still in the living room.

Government-issued cell phones are remarkably identical. It’s been fifteen or so years since this particular fact was relevant to him, but, as he sets her phone back on the night stand and turns to gently wake Scully, his still-remarkable memory flashes vividly back to 1999.

* * *

_A mostly-clean motel room_  
_The middle of nowhere, ID_  
_May 1999_  
_12:22 AM_  


The case had been strange—stranger than normal, even—and Mulder suspected that its implications were far more sinister than either the local police or the FBI were willing to consider. So he escalated the importance of the three background checks and two photo analyses he had routed through Washington earlier that evening.

Hence why Skinner called him, irately frustrated, at 12:30 in the morning, demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing with FBI resources. (Given the overall volume of the rebuke, Mulder suspected that Skinner had been unpleasantly woken up by one of his superiors and similarly quizzed.)

After a thoroughly unpleasant conversation that was much louder on Skinner’s end than Mulder’s, Skinner paused with a sigh, and Mulder swore he could hear his boss pinching the bridge of his nose on the other side of the phone.

“Dare I ask, Agent Mulder, why it is that you’re answering Agent Scully’s phone, but not your own?”

The question took Mulder completely off-guard, and he froze in shocked dismay. The actual answer, of course, was that he and Scully had spent two hours eating dinner and arguing about the case and another hour on activities soundly prohibited by the most lenient interpretation of the Bureau’s fraternization policy, and he was sleeping in her bed. He answered Scully’s phone because he was a much lighter sleeper than she was (she was still asleep), and he didn’t have the late night wherewithal to notice that it was her phone and not his. He wasn’t answering his own phone because it was still in his pants pocket, and his pants were currently on the floor of his motel room, through the now-closed connecting door.

Somehow, he didn’t think any of those answers would make Skinner very happy.

“Um,” he fumbled, brain sputtering back to life, “We, uh, were discussing the case before we went to bed, and we had our notes and everything spread out, and it got late, and I, uh, must’ve grabbed her phone instead of mine when I went back to my room.” Close enough.

There was an ominous pause.

“I, um, don’t know why Scully didn’t pick up my phone. Maybe the ringer was too quiet. She’s a pretty heavy sleeper.” There was another awkward silence. Mulder winced, unsure if he had made things worse. They’d been on enough cases together that he knew her sleeping patterns for entirely innocent reasons. But emphasizing that was probably unwise.

In a bit of irony that he was too tense to appreciate, Scully picked this moment to cease being a heavy sleeper and began to stir beside him. Mulder cast her an alarmed look and fervently willed her not to make any noise. He could have gotten up and walked towards his own room to finish this conversation (and he probably should have done that when he started it, in retrospect), but he didn’t want to risk her waking fully and asking him what was wrong.

Finally, Skinner apparently decided that he had suffered enough. “All right, Agent Mulder. Remember what I said about request protocol. I do NOT want to get another late-night call from a Director chewing my ass out over misuse of FBI resources and skewed priorities.”

“Yes, sir.”

After he hung up, Mulder released his building tension in a deep sigh and looked over at Scully, who was blinking at him sleepily.

“That was Skinner. Someone didn’t appreciate our sense of urgency, and he apparently called to pass on the message.”

Her eyes narrowed. Her voice was incisive, even when slightly hoarse with sleep. “ _Our_ sense of urgency, Mulder? I told you that it was a misuse of a policy meant to preserve resources for cases with actual time-sensitivity.”

He huffed a bit. “And I still maintain that this case absolutely qualifies; I’ve told you that.” He gazed at her, reflexively admiring, while trying to decide how much to tell her. Probably better to own up now than risk having her find out from Skinner and make up a different alibi. “Besides, apparently if Skinner can’t reach me to vent his spleen over _our_ case management, he calls you.” Her brow crinkled in confusion. “I answered your phone. I thought it was mine, but mine is still where you left it.”

She digested this for a moment, then looked at him with wide eyes. “What did you say?”

“That we worked on the case until late, and I accidentally grabbed your phone instead of mine. And you’re a heavy sleeper. All true and certainly close enough for government work.”

She groaned and threw her elbow over her eyes. “We need to be more diligent. I don’t want to risk that not being Skinner next time.”

“What, you mean, like if Kersh decides he misses us and needs to call in the middle of the night?”

“Or if it’s my mother with a family emergency? Or Bill?”

It was Mulder’s turn to groan.

* * *

_Another motel room_  
_Boston, MA_  
_August 1999_  
_2:41 AM_  


They had been efficiently shipped to Boston on a case that probably wasn’t a case and was even less probably an X-File. But the grown son of an influential lobbyist was deeply distressed over something, so the federal government put its best agents on the job. Its best agents for handling the vaguely supernatural, anyway. Or maybe just the agents they didn’t mind sending on a stupid, petty, yet somehow urgent complaint.

The FBI was never this efficient when there was actually something worth investigating, thought Mulder bitterly.

Mulder wasn’t ruling out the possibility that this assignment was designed to punish them in some indirect way. He hadn’t been in a very pleasant mood, considered the whole thing a dark mockery of their work. And being this close to home always tugged on him in some undefinable way. His childhood home had made him melancholy for his entire adult life, and these days his rueful memories were mixed with the current reality of his impossible relationship with his mother. He couldn’t figure out how to reach her, and he didn’t think she was capable of reaching him. Every choice, every action seemed choked in futility, until he was drowning in love and resentment.

He had handled the emotional turmoil about as gracelessly as he always did: had been impatient and sullen, sharper than necessary with all and sundry, mumbled snidely sarcastic barbs too loudly, and picked pointless fights with Scully. She wasn’t happy either, but was much more stoic, and, apart from a few pointed comments and looks, remained resolutely professional. And quietly, thoroughly pissed at him.

Their parting that evening had been tense and unpleasant, and he had spent the time since sitting alone in his motel room and glaring sulkily at the musty wallpaper. Until something in him crumpled, and it suddenly struck him as utterly ridiculous that he would actively damage the most solid and positive thing in his life out of spite originating from defensiveness of the X-Files and old family trauma. And so he kicked back from his chair, strode to the door of her room, and knocked. That was about as far as his planning had gotten, but when she opened the door, somehow an apology fell out of his mouth that was impressively incoherent and rambling even for him.

She pressed her mouth together in a line, but she listened and, as always, understood him (had likely understood him even before he attempted to explain himself). And as his apology tapered off as he ran out of words and emotional stamina, she reached for him and folded him into her arms.

Which is how he happened to be in her bed at the ungodly hour in the morning when a strident, piercing tone jarred him unpleasantly out of a sleep far more peaceful than he had anticipated at the beginning of the evening.

Had he been more cognizant, he would have been proud of the civility of his greeting. As it was, he stumbled out of bed and toward his own door, the action borne jointly from a bleary desire to preserve her sleep and the muddled memory that having her wake up and make noise while he was on the phone in the middle of the night would sound incriminating.

Skinner was on the other end of the line, and Mulder could almost hear his teeth grinding as he gave an urgent update on the case, which was painfully obviously only urgent in the mind of that impeccably-connected individual who had insisted on an FBI investigation. Mulder gathered that Skinner had been as unpleasantly jarred out of sleep as he, himself, had been, and then impelled to pass on an insipid message to his agents.

Acknowledging the update and giving Skinner a terse “good night,” Mulder snapped the phone shut. Which is when he noticed, from his position atop his unslept-in bed, that his phone was still moodily strewn on the table in front of the chair where he had begun the evening.

Son of a bitch.

At least Skinner apparently didn’t find 2:45 in the morning an opportune time to interrogate Mulder on the probability of FBI partners managing to go six years without mixing up their phones, only to do so twice in the middle of the night within three months. And hopefully the utter disaster of this case would ensure that the phone mix-up would remain unremarked and forgotten.

He sighed, gathered both phones, and made his way back to bed, carefully placing Scully’s on the nightstand on _her_ side of the bed.

She stirred briefly at his return, snuggled unconsciously closer, but didn’t wake up. He slipped an arm over her and let her sleep. The case would keep until morning, and the FBI and that spoiled brat could both kiss his ass if they thought otherwise.

* * *

_Fox Mulder’s apartment_  
_Alexandria, VA_  
_November 1999_  
_4:03 AM_  


They were on assignment in Washington, loaned out to Violent Crimes. It was a horrific case: multiple victims, kidnapping, mutilation, and murder. An active perpetrator and a ticking clock. The pathologist and the profiler had been called in: strange cavalry that normally hunted more fantastic monsters from the basement. They were both veterans by now, had seen their share of ghastly crimes, but Mulder still found this case rattling, and he could tell, despite the resolute set of her shoulders and her chin, that Scully did, too. The pressure was intense. Time had become an almost-palpable entity, creeping resolutely past while they remained stationary and grappled for leads.

Skinner had sent his two X-Files agents home after the excavation of a particularly grisly warehouse in Virginia. “Agents, you’ve been working now for almost thirty-six hours straight. You’re dead on your feet, and you won’t be any good to this case unless you get some sleep. Go home and rest; that’s an order.”

They had turned numbly, Mulder uncharacteristically obedient, and stumbled to the car they had taken together (hers). Scully drove them, by silent and common consent, to the closer apartment (his).

He scrounged up canned soup and crackers, and they ate in silence before making their way to bed and curling around each other. He relished the comfort, immensely grateful for their enduring emotional connection and the relatively new freedom to hold each other like this. His sleep-deprived mind added gratitude that he had bothered to replace the leaky water bed with a comfortable mattress. It was an absurd and shallow thought, given the circumstances, but then, he was incredibly tired. He surrendered gratefully to sleep.

The shrill phone that pierced his consciousness at a touch past four in the morning was even more unpleasant than normal.

“Mmmm’ello?” he managed.

The person on the other side of the line sighed. If he were more awake, Mulder might have pondered the implications of his ability to recognize Skinner by his sigh. As it was, he simply registered that Skinner was calling him.

“Sir?”

Another sigh. “Agent Mulder, I really need to talk to Agent Scully.”

“Then why didn’t you call her, instead of me?” The words formed in his addled brain and flowed out of his mouth before he could evaluate if saying them was a particularly good idea.

“I _did._ ”

Well, this was unpleasant. He woke up a little more.

“We need to ask about details from the second autopsy. I tried calling her at home, but, as you might be aware, she doesn’t seem to be home. And _you_ just answered her cell phone.”

There was an incredibly awkward pause. In the all-time history of awkward pauses, this one had to rank in the top one hundred. Mulder doubted he was currently capable of thinking of a remotely-plausible excuse. It would figure that the most unexplainable and incriminating time he did this, absolutely nothing untoward had preceded it. Well, if you count falling asleep together in a tangle as appropriate for platonic friends and coworkers.

His brain flitted around to the explanation that they simply hadn’t wanted to be alone. Which was true. And understandable. But it was also four in the morning, and he had answered her phone awfully sleepily and awfully quickly to be innocently in another room.

While his mind chased reasoning around in circles, the pause was growing unbearably thicker; he needed to stop thinking and come up with _something_ to say.

He went with simplicity. “Um.”

“Look, Mulder, right now I really need to talk to Scully. I’m going to assume you can give me a reasonable and plausible excuse as to why you’re answering her phone at four in the morning. But since we’re short on time, why don’t we just pretend you already gave it to me, and I pretended to believe you just like I did last time? And you can go ahead and give the phone to Scully. And maybe consider different ringtones, for God’s sake.”

“Yeah, OK, hold on a second.” Very eloquent of him, but no one could reasonably blame him for not being in top form just now. Mulder set the phone on the night stand before gently rousing Scully. She tended to mumble curses at him if he actively woke her up, and he didn’t figure Skinner needed to hear that on top of everything else.

As Scully blearily went over autopsy details with Skinner, Mulder took his own phone out, half an ear on the conversation, and changed its ring tone to something random on the phone’s audio menu. _(The random ringtone turned out to be especially unpleasant. Mulder jumped and winced when it went off for the first time and instantly silenced it. Skinner raised an eyebrow from across the desk and went back to writing notes. It took three more unpleasant surprises before he remembered to change it.)_ He made a mental note to augment his growing bedroom furniture collection with another nightstand. It really wouldn’t hurt to make sure her phone ended up on her side of the bed where he couldn’t get to it without conscious effort (or semi-conscious effort, anyway).

* * *

_Dana Scully’s apartment_  
_Georgetown, Washington, DC_  
_March 2000_  
_11:30 PM_  


Scully only answered Mulder’s government-issued cell phone once at an inappropriate hour, and she had done it like she did (almost) everything else: intentionally and with deliberation. Fox Mulder broke rules with abandon and then tried to smooth things out with charm. Dana Scully picked her infractions carefully and silently dared anyone to challenge her about them.

They had just gotten back from California, after finding a mass graveyard of children, after failing to find the bodies of two more little girls, after a séance with a con man, a journal of pain, and a conversation with an old nurse.

After Mulder’s mother had killed herself, severing the last thread of a family tapestry that had begun to unravel in 1973. Scully hated having to tell him about his mother’s suicide, hated that he’d asked her to do the autopsy (he knew, as well as she did, that she couldn’t refuse him, and she knew, as well as he did, that he would never trust what happened to his mother unless she did the autopsy herself). She hated the desperation in his voice, that he had warped into a parody of his greatest weaknesses, grasping so hard for a convoluted plot that would connect everything and add some sense to the pain that he had carried for years.

She was grateful that one of his family, at least, had died in heartbreakingly ordinary circumstances.

He had worried her throughout the LaPierre case and afterward, volatile and subdued by degrees. The old wound that was his sister’s disappearance had been ripped open—no, re-inflamed; it had never really healed properly. Her pathologist’s mind created morbid metaphors of unhealed wounds and infection, necrosis. A slow poison from the inside. And that contemptible (scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, shit-licking) charlatan Harold Piller had shown up just in time to press directly on Mulder where he was hurting the most.

She knew Mulder, and she knew the wound would remain unhealed as long as he still felt that he didn’t know for sure what had happened to Samantha. He was too obsessive and too stubborn to accept the passage of time and lack of evidence as proof that he could stop searching. Scully didn’t believe that Samantha was still alive; this story would never have anything other than a painful and tragic ending. But even if it was painful, debridement was requisite for healing. So she had flown back to Washington and tried again to do for Mulder what he had always done for people who had no one else to believe them.

Now, back again in Washington, she was still worried. Despite his soft declaration that he was free, he had been thoughtful and withdrawn. And more than uncharacteristically quiet. She wasn’t sure what he thought he had seen, what proof had finally given him peace after twenty-seven years, and she was unwilling to press him on it, at least for now. She had mirrored his introspective silence at the motel and booked their return flight for the satisfaction of doing something concretely useful. She scheduled the flight for the afternoon, leaving the morning for him to recover, should he need it. Then she had hovered worriedly, while trying to not appear to be hovering worriedly, until Mulder had taken pity on her with a soft smile and faraway look, and tugged her into bed with him. They both slept into the late morning.

Their flight had been delayed for three hours by a late-season ice storm over Chicago. They finally landed at Dulles late in the evening, where she herded him quietly into her car and took him home with her. He hadn’t protested, had pliantly followed her without saying anything. Sometimes he gazed out the window, and sometimes he gazed at her with an unfathomable expression. It bothered her that she was having so much trouble reading him. She usually didn’t.

After they got in the door, she took him loosely by the forearms and looked up to his face, which was staring straight ahead, in a sort of contemplative trance. “Come on, let’s go to bed. It’s late.”

He looked down at her, then, his eyes focusing on hers. She studied them. Grief and pain, yes, but he was absent the haunted, guilty look she had often seen in him when he thought about his sister. Its absence left a quiet tranquility. As they studied each other, a profound gratitude that made her heart ache slipped into his gaze. And, underlying it all, was intense love: deep, resolute, and a little awed.

He spoke finally, softly. “Thank you... Dana, you may not know this, although come to think of it, you probably do, but no one— _no one_ —has ever cared enough about me to do what you did for me. What you’ve always done for me. To retrace old leads, open old wounds, follow me even when you think I’m wrong, refuse to believe answers without proof—even if it might make me more bearable—and search for the proof for me even when I won’t—go where I won’t. And without you, I never...” his voice trailed off, a little broken.

She moved one hand from his forearm to his face. His gratitude always made her sad, that she was the only person to love him enough to fight for him (and alongside him and sometimes with him) without trying to use him. Mulder was shockingly easy to manipulate if you knew his vulnerabilities, and, though he would go to almost inhuman lengths to help other people, he always seemed surprised that Scully would be so tenaciously determined to help him. The fact that her forbearance and fortitude made her unique was tragic to her.

In the end, and like in so many other instances she could no longer count them all, what was mysteriously complex to him was directly simple to her. “Mulder, I love you. And you deserve your answers and your truth and your peace as much as anyone does. Now come on.”

She moved her hand from his face to take his hand, and he followed her to the bedroom.

_(If anyone were to ask him why he loves her so devotedly, it would be this: She views her remarkable love, loyalty, and integrity as ordinary, and justice as something to which everyone is entitled. Her answer to the inverse question would be that his enduring belief in the fantastic somehow paints the ordinary world into something remarkable, and that his tenacious compassion lingers, even after everything he’s been through, in a willingness to risk himself on the chance of saving a stranger. She hates that last trait even as she loves him for having it. She had had to leave to force him to realize that he had to save himself.)_

He fell asleep quickly, more easily than she could ever remember him doing. She watched over him for awhile, tracing his profile with her eyes and feeling fiercely protective. She was just beginning to drift off, herself, when his phone’s ring split the quiet. She slipped quickly out of bed to silence it before it woke him—whoever this was could certainly wait until morning. The name on the screen made her change her mind, and she took the phone out into the living room to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Agent Scully.” If Skinner was surprised at all, his voice didn’t betray it. She supposed any questions he’d had on that score were probably answered when she’d opened Mulder’s door wearing the previous day’s clothing and daring Skinner to take him away without her. “I wanted to check on Agent Mulder. I know your flight got in late; I figured he’d be home by now. Is he all right?”

“He’s asleep right now.” She glanced up to the ceiling, pondering phrasing. “The past several days have been very hard on him. These wounds are deep, and they go back a long time. But...” here she puffs out a breath, “he’ll be OK. It will take time, but I actually think he’ll be more OK than he’s been in a very long time.”

She knew Skinner well enough to sense his nod of acknowledgement through the phone, and the change in body language that accompanied the change from personal concern to professional matters. “I’m giving the two of you a week on administrative leave. You did excellent work on a very difficult case and provided a lot of grieving families with badly-needed answers. I’ll see you in a week for your report and debriefing. Good night, Agent Scully.”

* * *

_Unremarkable apartment_  
_Washington, DC_  
_July 2015_  
_6:12 AM_  


Mulder sits on the couch with one leg crossed over the other, showered and looking presentable in one of the suits that have migrated to her apartment. Reasonably early in their renewed partnership, she had insisted he keep one or two here _(“Just in case”)_ , which he had tried not to overanalyze. No matter what it means, he’s grateful now. He doubts that anyone at the FBI would notice if he wears the same suit and shirt to work two days in a row, but he’d rather not find out. And yesterday’s suit is in need of ironing.

They are prompt about getting ready for the day, but they don’t rush. Skinner hadn’t said it was an emergency, and Mulder figures that their boss expected one (or, on reflection, possibly both) of them to be in rural Virginia.

He has recovered his glasses from the bedroom floor and is poking at the phone rescued from his discarded jacket when Scully comes in, showered and half-dressed, in pursuit of the coffee he had started. His phone emits an obnoxious jangling noise, and she peers at him over the rim of her mug.

“What are you doing, Mulder?”

He smiles a bit and glances up at her over the top of his glasses. “Auditioning ring tones, Scully; listen!” The next noise his phone emits is an unseemly whoop that is more obnoxious than the jangling.

She wrinkles her nose. “Ring tones? How old are you, anyway, Mulder? When were ring tones last a popular thing to fuss about?”

“1999, I think.” He keeps the same small smile, but holds her eyes long enough for her to register that there’s a reference to be gotten, and he sees when the understanding blooms across her face.

She chuffs and rolls dancing eyes, exasperated and fond. “I really would have expected you to know how to avoid doing that by now.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault; I forgot how damn identical these things were. And I left mine out here in my jacket. And I wake up quicker, and your phone was on my side of the bed, anyway.” His tone is light, but the last part slips out before he can stop it. He’s not sure if he regrets the allusion to his unease over bedroom furniture, wonders if she can even tell that he’s uneasy, wonders if he’s being presumptuous, wonders if she cares.

Her eyes shift thoughtfully before she seems to come to a conclusion. And then she’s looking at him softly. “Mulder, I always sleep on your side of the bed when you’re not in it.” She doesn’t add _“because it’s less empty that way,”_ but she doesn’t need to. He can see it in her eyes.

_(It’s a habit that started when he was gone the first time, back when they had separate beds, but each with a side carved out for the other. They had seeped inexorably into each other’s space over seven years, and she felt profoundly empty, overwhelmed by the hollow where he had been. Her own bed had seemed unbearably lonely, so she had slept in his, lying across both sides, trying to fill the empty space beside her. His sheets still smelled like him for a month after he was gone, and she had cried again when she realized that they no longer did. As she grew used to the hollow, and the space within her filled with new life, she went back to sleeping on one side of the bed. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave empty the side that had been his.)_

He reads the pain of his various absences, physical and mental, across her face. And, though he feels it acutely (the emotion borders on overpowering, but he’s so, so grateful to be able to feel again), he doesn’t know what to say. So he sets his phone on the coffee table, rises and crosses the room. He kisses her forehead like he always has and tucks her into his arms. And, chin atop her head, he finally murmurs, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never once intended to be gone, Dana, and I never will. But no matter what happens, I’ll always do my damnedest to make sure I come back.”

_(This is a promise she will hold desperately in her mind and in her soul months later, when he does return to her, barely clinging to life. He will look at her through fading eyes and whisper that she saved the world with the ghost of an affectionate smile he can’t quite manage. She will reply fiercely that_ they _will save the world, and that she isn't doing it without him.)_

 ~

_6:40 AM_

Scully has re-emerged from the bedroom, fully dressed and made up, with hair smoothly tamed. Mulder has concluded his ring tone search, and, upon seeing her, he stows his glasses in his shirt pocket and goes in pursuit of his shoes. He discovers a fatal flaw in his sartorial preparedness. Black suit, brown shoes. Oh well. At least the suit he wore yesterday is grey, so once that one is clean, he’ll be more prepared for different shoe contingencies. “Hey, Scully, you think I can blame this on being color blind?”

She looks down at his shoes and smirks, pouring coffee into a travel mug. “No. But you wore enough hideous ties over the years that you could plausibly think that brown shoes go with a black suit.”

They head out the door, and he rests his hand at the small of her back. He remembers buying a second nightstand when he lived in Alexandria and wonders if she’ll do the same now.

On their way into work, his phone rings. It’s just a wrong number, and the other commuters don’t really take any notice, but Scully arches her eyebrow.

At her questioning look, “Do you recognize this theme?”

“Vaguely. Should I?”

“It’s our theme song, Scully! And I think it suits us. Kind of spooky.” A beat. “Don’t you remember our movie?”

If possible, her eyebrow climbs higher. “I remember that movie very clearly, Mulder. I must say that I’m surprised you want to commemorate it.”

“Well, not the movie itself, maybe, but the evening after the premier was certainly memorable. And I remember reflecting on that period in our lives—it was the first time I’d truly been happy in a long time, even with...everything. I think the impression of overall happiness washed out the stultifying awkwardness in my memory.”

She’s smiling now and brushes his cheek with her fingertips. “You _do_ have a remarkable memory, Mulder.”

**Author's Note:**

> I probably rushed the S10 timeline a bit, as far as reconciliations go, but I don't feel too bad about it because the timeline there is already a mess. I'm not even entirely sure of the year it's supposed to take place. I will fight you in defense of my mid-1999 timing, though.


End file.
